Head-to-head mountain climbing from the safety of your game room

[Jeff] built this delightful piece which you can see in action after the break. he combined several very simple ideas and he did it really well. The climbers are both mechanical. They grip the mountain’s face (which is covered with of carpet) with a tack pointed downward on the end of each limb. Their motion is provided by two tiny servos that make up the body of the climber. The two potentiometers in each controller directly affect the movement of the top and bottom limbs. The game plays music during the contest, and precisely detects a winner by sensing when an arm comes in contact with the metal snow cap at the summit.

Obviously weight was an issue during the design process. After some hemming and hawing [Jeff] decided to tether the climbers in order to avoid rolling a battery into each. But he overcame the issue with weighted cable management on the inside of the mountain.

I just had a cool idea, what if the carpet was on a roller (like a conveyorbelt or treadmill) and there were obstacles attached randomly along the carpet by some sort of mechanism that you had to avoid? And you had to survive for as long as possible without either being too slow and falling off the bottom or getting knocked off by the obstacles.

nice! I get the idea that tweaking the climbers makes a huge difference… so I can imagine it’s tough to have two completely similar climbers for head to head racing. Still, I know my friends would get a hoot playing one of these!

I also thought of the Price Is Right, lol. Really really cool. I think it would be even better with some small obstacles placed strategically around the course. You might need a way of moving horizontally though, in the even of getting stuck below an obstacle. Still, fantastic job and it actually looks fun to play.